Part 4 (1/2)

After that, things got serious People would work for hours, seeking a way to do the sa in fewer lines of code It became more than a competition; it was a quest For all the effort expended, no one seemed to be able to crack the fifty-line barrier The question arose whether it was even possible to do it in less Was there a point beyond which a progra with this dilemma was a fellow named Jenson, a tall, silent hacker froe Room and scribble on printouts with the cal Jenson was always looking for ways to corams in time and space--his code was a coled Boolean and arith several different cohteen-bit ”word” Aical stunts

Before Jenson, there had been general agreeorithm for a decimal print routine would have thea table of the powers of ten to keep the nuured that a powers-of-ten table wasn't necessary; he caits in a reverse order but, by soht of hand, print them out in the proper order There was a complex mathematical justification to it that was clear to the other hackers only when they saw Jenson's progra them that he had taken the decimal print routine to its limit FORTY-SIX INSTRUCTIONS People would stare at the code and their jaould drop Marge Saunders re unusually quiet for days afterward

”We knew that was the end of it,” Bob Saunders later said ”That was Nirvana”

COMPUTERS CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOR THE BETTER

This belief was subtly manifest Rarely would a hacker try to ies of the coe to an outsider Yet this premise dominated the everyday behavior of the TX-0 hackers, as well as the generations of hackers that caed THEIR lives, enriched their lives, given their lives focus, made their lives adventurous It had made them masters of a certain slice of fate Peter Samson later said, ”We did it twenty-five to thirty percent for the sake of doing it because it was so we could do and do well, and sixty percent for the sake of having so, which would do things on its oe were finished That's the great thing about prograical appeal it hasOnce you fix a behavioral problerae of what you meant”

LIKE ALADDIN'S LAMP, YOU COULD GET IT TO DO YOUR BIDDING

Surely everyone could benefit fro this power

Surely everyone could benefit from a world based on the Hacker Ethic This was the implicit belief of the hackers, and the hackers irreverently extended the conventional point of viehat co the world to a neay of looking and interacting with computers

This was not easily done Even at such an advanced institution as MIT, some professors considered a manic affinity for coner once had to explain to an engineering professor what a coner experienced this clash of computer versus anti-computer even more vividly when he took a Numerical analysis class in which the professor required each student to do ho, clunky electromechanical calculators Kotok was in the same class, and both of the with those lo-tech ot this coram that would eeous To some, it was ato the standard thinking on computers, their tis which took s that otherould take roo Hackers felt otherwise: anything that see interactive co clearance for your specific project, you could act on that belief After two or three -point arithram to knohere to place the decimal point) on a machine that had no siner had written three thousand lines of code that did the job He had made a ridiculously expensive computer perform the function of a calculator that cost a thousand tiram Expensive Desk Calculator, and proudly did the horade--zero ”You used a coht”

Wagner didn't even bother to explain How could he convey to his teacher that the co realities out of ere once incredible possibilities? Or that another hacker had even written a program called Expensive Typewriter that converted the TX-0 to so in strings of characters and print it out on the Flexowriter--could you i a classwork report WRITTEN BY THE COMPUTER? How could that professor--how could, in fact, anyone who hadn't been immersed in this uncharted ner and his fellow hackers were routinely using the coe situations which one could scarcely envision otherwise”? The professor would learn in time, as would everyone, that the world opened up by the computer was a limitless one

If anyone needed further proof, you could cite the project that Kotok orking on in the Coram that bearded Al professor ”Uncle” John McCarthy, as he was becoun on the IBM 704